The wisdom and beauty of these laws strike me with admiration and reverence.

What has been said of printing, can be extended to every agent for the advancement of labor—­from the nail and the mallet, up to the locomotive and the electric telegraph.  Society enjoys all, by the abundance of its use, its consumption; and it enjoys all gratuitously.  For as their effect is to diminish prices, it is evident that just so much of the price as is taken off by their intervention, renders the production in so far gratuitous.  There only remains the actual labor of man to be paid for; and the remainder, which is the result of the invention, is subtracted; at least after the invention has run through the cycle which I have just described as its destined course.  I send for a workman; he brings a saw with him; I pay him two dollars for his day’s labor, and he saws me twenty-five boards.  If the saw had not been invented, he would perhaps not have been able to make one board, and I would none the less have paid him for his day’s labor.  The usefulness, then, of the saw, is for me a gratuitous gift of nature, or rather, is a portion of the inheritance which, in common with my brother men, I have received from the genius of my ancestors.  I have two workmen in my field; the one directs the handle of a plough, the other that of a spade.  The result of their day’s labor is very different, but the price is the same, because the remuneration is proportioned, not to the usefulness of the result, but to the effort, the [time, and] labor given to attain it.

I invoke the patience of the reader, and beg him to believe, that I have not lost sight of free trade:  I entreat him only to remember the conclusion at which I have arrived:  Remuneration is not proportioned to the usefulness of the articles brought by the producer into the market, but to the [time and] labor required for their production.[B]

[Footnote B:  It is true that [time and] labor do not receive a uniform remuneration; because labor is more or less intense, dangerous, skilful, &c., [and time more or less valuable.] Competition establishes for each category a price current:  and it is of this variable price that I speak.]

I have so far taken my examples from human inventions, but will now go on to speak of natural advantages.

In every article of production, nature and man must concur.  But the portion of nature is always gratuitous.  Only so much of the usefulness of an article as is the result of human labor becomes the object of mutual exchange, and consequently of remuneration.  The remuneration varies much, no doubt, in proportion to the intensity of the labor, of the skill, which it requires, of its being a-propos to the demand of the day, of the need which exists for it, of the momentary absence of competition, &c.  But it is not the less true in principle, that the assistance received from natural laws, which belongs to all, counts for nothing in the price.